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CFO Magazine’s Emma Foster sat down with Mark Gilham, Vice President & Head of Advisory Services at rebate management leader Enable during his recent visit to Australia for Enable’s annual rebate strategy conference, Elevate, and discussed the role of rebate management as a driver of business performance.
EF – After two decades in finance roles at the likes of UK-based construction supplier Grafton and financial services firm Barclays, you joined Enable in 2022. What was the attraction? MG – When I joined Grafton in 2014, I became one of Enable’s first clients. I got to know Andrew Butt, the CEO, and as he explained his vision for the evolution of rebate management, that really interested me and the rest of the team. As one of Enable’s earliest clients, we had the ability to help shape what the product could look like and, bit by bit, we were able to leave our rebate spreadsheets behind in favour of the software. So, I’ve seen firsthand the benefits of the platform, and how having the right rebate management platform can dramatically improve how a company manages and optimises their rebates. Eight years on, I attended Enable’s conference in 2022 as a customer as I was transitioning out of my role – and the stars aligned. Andrew and the team had already closed two rounds of funding, a great signal to me that the team had the backing to deliver on the vision. I was excited to be part of propelling the company forward to its next phase. EF – You spend a lot of your time educating finance professionals that there is a better way when it comes to rebates. How so? MG – Rebates have been part of doing business for a long time, and act as a type of incentive to motivate trading partners for mutual success. But for many reasons, rebates don’t always drive the behaviours they were intended to, and they have always been tricky to administer from an accounting perspective. In fact, when you train to become an accountant, no one teaches you rebate management. The reality is there is also often very little accuracy in tracking rebates, causing variances to the bottom line, not because anybody is doing anything wrong, but because there’s so many moving parts and not enough hours in the day to keep an eye on everything. Technology platforms, like Enable, are transforming all that by bringing visibility to what is actually happening to give you much greater precision. We’ve also built a framework that helps people take the ‘murkiness’ out of rebates and turn them into ‘black and white’. EF – Why should CFOs take notice? MG – As the custodian of the profit of a business, the modern CFO is not just responsible for reporting profit, but influencing it. If you are influencing profit, you need to be influencing rebates because they can be a big driver of profit in your business. To read the first the full story, head to CFO Magazine. Comments are closed.
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